"POPS," or Privately Owned Public Spaces, are indoor or outdoor spaces throughout New York City which are dedicated to public use, owned and maintained by adjacent private property owners. Numbering over 550 in the city, most are parks, plazas, indoor atriums, and sometimes rooftops. Mayor Bill de Blasio, the Department of City Planning , The Municipal Art Society of New York, and Advocates for Privately Owned Public Space (APOPS) announced an international competition for the redesign of the POPS logo, which would replace old signage marking these spaces around the city. 

The “pin” is synonymous with navigation and place, and the silhouette is identifiable from well over 20 feet. Upon further inspection, the logo illustrates the core of the POPS concept: shared space that gives back to the city and its people, offering respite from our day to day lives, illustrated by the form of a leaf that creates public space between two buildings. The leaf is a nod to the greenery of many existing indoor and outdoor POPS spaces. The center point of the pin doubles as a sun peeking between the buildings and shedding light onto the public space itself. A clever solution for recognizability and narrative, this logo relates to a universal symbol and speaks to New York City’s creative solution to the formation of public space.

A collaboration with Anders Izumi Evenson, Daniel Villegas Cruz, and Andrew Delgado Wong.